organic selection at munichfabricstart

From 31/8 – 2/9 the munichfabricstart will take place, and for the first time it will have an “organic selection”. The textile fair might be interesting for all, who are looking for organic textiles. The organizers write:

“Featuring a selection of around 340 woven and knitted fabrics the organicselection Forum located right in the entrance concourse of Hall 4 is a cornerstone of this system – your pool of ideas. Experts will be ready and available to answer any questions or discuss matters with you. Our trade fair’s proprietary labelling with organicicons has been further refined so asto make assessment of the individual organic fabrics even easier for you.”

The info-leaflet “organicselection” provides some information about social and environmental standards. They rightly argue:

Ideally, clothing should be produced not only in a clean but also socially compatible way – making it doubly good. There are a plethora of social standards in use now – though they do denote different levels. Five acknowledged seals are permitted here. Exhibitors reaching this benchmark will receive one orange icon.

As acknowledged seals they permit: BSCI, Cotton made in Africa, ETI, FLO, SA 8000 – these are seemingly all standards that apply to the textile industry. I guess that the multi-stakeholder initiatives FLA, FWF, WRC are not listed here, because they do not apply to textile companies, but only to retailers and brands that are producing garments, which shows a problem of these approaches. However, regarding the textile industry this list shows that the ETI and SA 8000 are the only multi-stakeholder initiatives working on the level of textile production. The FLO standard only applies to the cotton fields, and CmiA (I guess) also. BSCI applies to textile producers, but the standard allows these companies to free-ride on standards to a quite large extent, as my own research showed.